


desert light

by Destina



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-04
Updated: 2005-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-03 23:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4118728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destina/pseuds/Destina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fable, or a tale of what might have been, about how Jack and Daniel find each other when the team is marooned in ancient Egypt. AU of Moebius part 2, in a way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	desert light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taselby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taselby/gifts), [Brighid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brighid/gifts).



> Written in 2005; posted to AO3 in June 2015.

By the time Jack was ready to let go of the future, the desert sun had burned three years' worth of light and heat into his skin. Sam's fair complexion had taken on a golden sheen, as had Daniel's, though their bodies resisted at first, the result of too many years buried inside a mountain. The robes never seemed to matter much; the light found its way beneath, into every pore and stretch of skin, bright and insistent.

Daniel loved the light, the variable patterns of color across the sand as the sun shifted in the sky overhead, charting a path to the end of the day. He'd learned those patterns by heart once upon a time yet to come, and this Egypt was similar enough to that one to be comforting to him. This Egypt wasn't cluttered with traffic and pollution; this Egypt had no tourists, save four who wandered in and were caught by circumstance. This Egypt wasn't ancient. It was alive, and so were they, and this miracle was enough to sustain Daniel. He wondered if anything would be enough to sustain Jack, but that was before he remembered Jack did one thing well above all others: survive.

To survive is not necessarily to be alive, Daniel knew, but he had hopes for Jack. Jack loved the sun, and the sun silvered Jack's hair and darkened his skin in payment for his worship. Some days he stood out in the shimmering heat, staring off into the desert as if he could see across millennia, into a future so profoundly altered they would never have recognized its parameters. Perhaps it was a future where Jack never had a son; perhaps it was a future where SG-1 never formed, where they never knew and loved each other. Daniel found this hard to accept, and so he didn't think about it, much; he was tempted to ask Jack what he believed, but the conversation never came about.

Not that Jack would have told him, anyway. The mirage in the desert was a private vision, one he never cared to share.

The first year was the hardest for all of them. Daniel had adjusted to the lack of modern conveniences several times in his career, but it was never easy. Teal'c had once lived in an anachronistic society without comforts or ease, and his Spartan warrior's lifestyle served him well. Sam, though, missed all the technology that could have given her distraction, and Jack missed simple things - baseball, cheesy Spanish-language TV, home shopping networks on drone in the background as he tapped out mission reports with four fingers on a laptop. Jack, who knew how to sustain a life on captured water and bugs, was the one who pined for a cheeseburger. 

They knew how to avoid the Jaffa, and they were in agreement: they would bide their time until the right opportunity arose. They had, after all, five thousand years before they were expected anywhere; they could afford to wait. 

By the second year, they had their routines. They still all shared one tent, eating and sleeping together like family, never a second thought about it. They knew one another's moods better and faster than they could recognize their own. Daniel noticed that they were often defined by what they did not do, rather than what they did. Sam never cooked. Teal'c never missed a chance to participate in the sparse community, to prove his own goodwill, and to erase their fears of the shining symbol on his face. Jack never slept a night straight through, and Daniel never lost his love of exploration, or his sense of wonder. 

Jack took to following him out into the desert, almost without Daniel noticing, and by the time he did, he was used to it. Thus the natural order of their days progressed; Sam and Teal'c, in camp, while Daniel and Jack cast long shadows over the sand. 

At the start of the third year, the seer predicted rain would come, but Sam shot down that theory as unlikely. She'd done a climatological study to amuse herself, and Daniel had helped her with what little he knew about the patterns of wind and rain. The sky was bright and blue, wispy clouds overhead without moisture and Sam was confident in her prediction, but Daniel wasn't so sure. The air around them felt charged, heavy with electricity, like the smell of ozone before a storm. 

Beside the community fire that night, Sam shook off her robes. For the first time in longer than he could remember, Daniel saw her as the woman she used to be - golden hair shining in moonlight, her skin carrying the glow of the day into darkness, and the shape of her body in her t-shirt and BDUs. So much memory came rushing back at the sight of her, and for a moment he could feel the unfairness of it, the guilt, crushing his heart. 

He had agreed to set the guilt aside, however, for Sam, and so he did. That they could love him in spite of his mistake -- that they could forgive him for the idea that condemned them all -- made him want to please them by forgiving himself. 

Jack sat next to Sam, still swaddled in his own robes. Beneath them, Daniel knew, Jack still wore his tags; no power aside from death would get him to put aside that last vestige of who he would become. No one here could read them, not even Ra, but that wasn't the point. Sam never argued with him, though she'd buried hers right away. Too eager, Daniel thought, to pretend they mattered. 

It caught him by surprise when Sam turned to Jack, when she spoke softly to him, words no one else could hear. Jack reached out to her, laid a palm at the side of her cheek, and looked at her so tenderly that Daniel blinked back his surprise. He had no right to watch. He was an intruder at his own fire, an unwelcome visitor. What came next, he was never to know; the desert was calling, as seductive in the dark as in the day, and he wandered away into it, without Jack's shadow behind. 

In the morning, Sam's things were gone, and she had moved into her own tent, not far from theirs. When Daniel pressed his hand into hers and asked for her reasons, he noticed the faint tracks of tears on her cheeks, dusted over with the day, and he knew why Jack had touched her. He wondered if Jack's answer would have been different, if they had had more time to live their old lives and follow things through to conclusion. But these lives didn't seem to belong to them, anymore; these lives were different, and Jack had stepped off the path Daniel had always seen for him. 

For the rest of the day, Daniel looked for Jack, but it was clear Jack did not want to be found. He returned late that night, at the edge of sunrise. When he met Daniel's eyes, there was a strange wildness there, a restless exhaustion Daniel didn't understand, and could not cure with words. 

Teal'c was the next to leave the tent, and this time, Daniel understood why. It was always two by two, their pattern and routine, and no one could be left alone, even if they greatly desired the silence of solitude to nurse their wounds. He spoke with Teal'c, offered to be the one who went with Sam; they had always been close, and he had some idea of the depth of her pain. But something had already passed between Jack and Teal'c, the touch of a hand in shadow, in private, and Teal'c had his own reasons for going. Daniel knew only enough to make him wonder, and not enough to intervene. 

The tent seemed too large, without them, and now it seemed Jack could not sleep at all. 

Daniel went out alone, for a time, and then one day Jack joined him again, returning to the unspoken pact, their pattern and routine. This day Daniel watched the clouds that drifted and climbed against the sky, turning blue to ashy grey and filtering the sun. They walked the rim of the valley that would one day become a resting place for kings, an irresistible, unreachable place, a place Daniel had never seen in its pristine form, without roads and markers to show the way. Daniel would have explained it to Jack, as he often did, but Jack seemed distant. Better to be silent, when Jack's attention was far away. It was as if there was a problem to be solved, one Jack could only reach by turning inward.

Mid-morning, when the sun should have begun its assault, the sky opened up and within moments, a drop of rain splattered across Daniel's nose. He no longer wore his glasses; too much risk they would set him apart. So he raised his face to the sky and smiled as the passing storm left its gift, an intermittent blessing. He threw his arms open and grinned at Jack, because there were so few happy surprises, now, and it took so little for joy to begin. 

Jack was watching him, and there, in the rain, the distance resolved itself. Daniel could see Jack unravel, as clearly as if he had tugged a thread and the sky had come undone, slipping down out of the heavens and into his hands. Jack shrugged off his robes, left his weapon there on the ground; he took Daniel's face in between his hands and kissed him, licking the rain from his nose, from his cheeks and eyelids. 

He laid Daniel down in the sand, with his robe beneath, and the rain soaked into their skin where the sun had dried it. Jack touched as if he had imagined where to touch; he kissed as if he had already tasted the curve of Daniel's smile. They moved together, slowly at first, unexpected hard angles and unaccustomed strangeness, easily resolved by gentle exploration. Then a surprising roughness took over, driving them, the slick cool feel of skin and the heat, burning its way out as surely as it had burned its way in, right from the beginning. 

Daniel watched the sky above, and then saw it in Jack's eyes, and he gave himself over to the white-hot sear of pleasure -- Jack's hands buried in Daniel's hair, Jack's lips on the hollow of Daniel's throat, and no sound but ragged gasps for breath. No earth beneath him, just the feel of Jack's body against him, and Jack's skin, painted beneath his fingertips. No past to conquer, no future to ache for, just the scent of Jack's skin, and the taste of his need. 

When they returned to the village, nothing was different. The storm had cleared, and no one had died that day; Ra had been merciful, and had taken tribute instead of lives. Sam did not cook. Teal'c did not refuse an offer to help the children patch together a ball. 

Jack did not sleep the night through, and Daniel never lost his love of exploration, or his sense of wonder.


End file.
